


angels that have walked the sun and slept on the moon

by havethecouragetoexist



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, But Also!, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Rated teen for language, but if you're a Youth who doesn't care about language, then hello, this was meant to be a short one-shot, what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2018-12-23 09:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11987292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havethecouragetoexist/pseuds/havethecouragetoexist
Summary: She is brilliant as the light of all the suns and stars in the galaxy, burning white-hot and fierce and ready to burn up those who get too close, so of course she is a Skywalker.Why else does she hold such fire within herself if not so she can be worthy of walking amidst the incandescence of the stars?





	1. don't you ever tame your demons

**Author's Note:**

> hello my friends! welcome to the hellscape that is sheryl's inability to a) finish a fic idea satisfactorily and b) have any sort of coherently similar writing style!!! this was meant to start out as a short(ish) look at three major moments from three stages of leia's life and degenerated into a 20k character study monster :/ apologies in advance if you get whiplash from sudden angst-fluff changes, and i might add more apologies along the way bc lord knows they're needed
> 
> hope you enjoy!!

**CHAPTER I**

Senator at eighteen, Leia Organa still cannot (will never) fully grasp the finer points of diplomacy. She is spitfire and acid tongue, and there is too much in her to ever pretend to bend backwards and give in.

She does not know it yet, but it is the Skywalker blood in her.

When she meets Darth Vader for the first time, she does not negotiate. She does not pretend, she does not bow. Instead, she sneers.

“Lord Vader. Only you could be so bold.”

(Somewhere, a ghost is equal parts exasperated and fond. Queen at fourteen, she had mastered diplomacy in a way that Leia could not; dead at twenty-seven, she has no desire to see her daughter follow in her footsteps.)

*

Leia watches Alderaan (Alderaan, Bail, Breha, Alderaan, her home, _her home_ ) crumble, Vader’s hand on her shoulder and his mechanical breaths in her ear. His grip is strong, as if to stop her from turning away, but Darth Vader does not know Leia Organa. She is her father’s daughter, she is her mother’s daughter, and to turn away would be to spit on their memory.

So she stands, spine iron-strong, and she watches.

Leia knows exactly what time it is on Alderaan, has been counting the minutes and hours since she was captured because she thinks it is the only thing that will keep her sane, so she knows that the Queen would have been taking her daily stroll through the gardens. Bail Organa would have been with his wife, the two of them linked arms and linked hearts, dark heads bent together as they whispered gossip about the other senators. Bail would have picked a flower – against the repeated chastisements of the groundskeeper – and he would have tucked it into Breha’s curls and he would have pressed a gentle kiss to her lips and they would have laughed and it is too much, too _much_ for Leia.

Her heart feels like it will burst and, impossibly, like it will constrict into nothingness at the same time. There are too many emotions inside her, guilt and fear and grief and regret, but most of all she feels _rage_. Her fingers tremble with the effort of keeping them loose by her sides instead of clenching them into fists, and her throat is sandpaper-rough and her eyes are burning, but she stands statue, and she does not move, she does not speak. She is Senator, she is Princess, she is the last Alderaanian, so it falls to her to give the last of Alderaan the dignity it deserves.

(If the lights in the room flicker and if the ship trembles for a few minutes, no one notices.)

*

When the farm boy and the smuggler burst into her cell, blasters in hand, Leia is relieved to leave her cell.

(In the grey quiet of her cell, there is nothing and no one to remember but the pain of thousands, screaming and then suddenly silenced all at once.)

She takes control, and even if this is the first time she has fired a blaster outside of the range, even if her words to her rescuers are too knife-sharp, even if she is reckless and running in a way that she has never been before, there is no one but herself to realise.

She can hear Bail Organa’s worried voice telling her to slow down, to watch herself, like that time when she decided to climb the palace walls and was already halfway up before he arrived. She can hear Breha Organa’s exasperation, telling her that she cannot sustain herself on fire alone, like that time when she had turned up, bruised and bloody and defiant from a fight with a girl who had called her a false princess, nothing but an orphan plucked out of the trash, and her mother had sighed and wiped away the blood on her lip.

She can hear them, but they are nothing but ghosts, and they are dead, dead, dead, so Leia soldiers (hurtles) on, eyes and ears shut to everything but the enemy in front of her.

*

At first, they called her Queen.

Leia was wrong; she is not the last Alderaanian, but those who are left are few and far between.

They call her Queen.

It should not surprise her; after all, she is (was) heir to Alderaan, and the Queen of Alderaan is dead –

Leia does not continue that train of thought, because she knows that down that road lies despair, and Leia Organa does not let herself give in to despair.

They call her _Queen_.

It is the next logical step, Leia knows, but.

It leaves a terrible taste in her mouth when they call her Queen. It tastes of blood, of all the lives that she couldn’t save. It tastes bitter and stale, like dirt and ashes in her mouth.

(How can she be Queen of a place that no longer exists?)

The throne to Alderaan is empty now, and of all the Alderaanians left Leia seems to be the only one willing to admit that there is no longer a throne to fill. It was crushed, obliterated into stardust along with the people and the planet around it.

Leia cannot imagine placing herself in that throne, and she does not _want_ to, because the last Queen was her mother. To her, the Queen of Alderaan has always been, and will always be, a brown-haired woman with warm-earth eyes, compassionate and quick and strong. Breha Organa was the first woman she ever saw wearing a crown and the ceremonial robes of a queen, before she was old enough to know what history and titles and holodocumentaries are. Breha Organa was the first person to ever sit her down and tell her what it meant to be royalty, and also the most suited, because she deserved royalty down to the marrow of her bones.

Queen Breha Organa was the first Queen of Alderaan that Leia ever knew, and Leia thinks it only fitting that she be the last.

(More than that, it feels wrong, perverse, to take the seat vacated by her mother, especially when Leia questions _everyday_ if she could have saved her.)

She has a responsibility to carry on the legacy of her home, but Leia thinks that she is more than able to do that as the last Princess of Alderaan.

(Let the ghosts remain in the past, because that is what the Queen of Alderaan is now, no more than a ghost.)

And so it is that Leia walks into the mess hall one day, looking surer than she feels, and pulls one of the Alderaani pilots aside for a few quick words.

At first, they called her Queen, but they stop, eventually. Most call her Princess, some simply Leia, and, as the war drags on and Leia earns her stripes, General Organa.

*

“Leia!”

Luke is barreling down the corridor in his flight suit, all sandy blond curls and crinkle-eyed smile. The exuberance constantly hangs about him like a well-worn suit, enthusiasm and optimism shining out of him like Tatooine’s twin suns. Han hangs back a few meters behind him, a new spot of oil on the left shoulder of his jacket, hands tucked into the pockets of his pants as he saunters at a slower pace.

“Luke,” Leia looks up, and the knot in her chest eases a little when she sees them. She feels the corners of her lips pull up ever so slightly, but the smile drops when she sees Luke’s – and, to a lesser extent, Han’s – expressions.

“Whoa, Leia,” Luke’s eyes are wide, “what happened to _you_?” Han stalks closer, his eyes narrowed as he catches up to Luke.

“You look like a bantha spat on you, Your Worship.”

“As eloquent as ever, Captain,” Leia sniffs, slightly irked when the sound comes out more wet than disdainful. She sighs and resists the urge to rub at her eyes. “If you must know, I may be feeling slightly…under the weather.”

“Ha! That’s one way of putting it,” Han leans in to poke at her shoulder, “Bet you haven’t gone to the medbay yet.”

“That is entirely unnecessary,” but a muscle in her jaw twitches ever so slightly because the spot where Han jabbed his finger hasn’t really stopped smarting, and her eyes are _really_ so itchy that she can barely keep them open under the fluorescent white lighting of the base corridor.

“Woah, Leia.” Luke grabs her elbow with a steadying hand, which is when she realises that she’s listing a little to the side to lean on the wall.

(His hand is warm, and it’s actually really nice; she can practically feel the warmth spreading through her body from where his fingers grip her arm, and does she imagine it or do her eyes clear a little?)

“I really think you should let the med-droid look you over, and maybe take a break – not for too long!” Luke interrupts himself when Leia opens her mouth to argue, “Just a quick nap, an hour or two, y’know.”

“Who knows, Princess, you may even dream of a way to defeat the Empire once and for all.” Han’s voice is dry, but when Leia looks up at his face the expression that hovers there isn’t as biting as it could be.

“…I suppose,” says Leia, and suddenly with this admission whatever was holding her up before leeches away. She sags even more than before against Luke, who looks immeasurably relieved.

Her bones are appeased, the exhaustion she was pushing aside previously coursing through her veins with twice as much force as before, throwing up hands in thanks.

She wrenches her spine back straight as quickly as she can, and, between Han and Luke, eventually makes it to the medbay.

*

Some nights (most nights; all nights), Leia sits up in her bed, sweating and shaking, the flashes still echoing behind her eyes. Some of the pilots wake up screaming in their beds, she knows, wake up screaming for all they lost and left behind in the war, in the fighting, but not Leia.

Some of the pilots have nightmares, but Leia Organa only has one – every night, day after day after day, she dreams of Alderaan. Sometimes she sees her parents and her people, feels their terror as they watch the burning, blinding red in the sky and know that it is their death; sometimes she is simply standing on the Death Star, far, far away from her parents and everything she ever knew and loved and grew up with as the weapon fires and she is unable to do much more than watch, guilt and anger and _fucking_ helplessness twisting themselves into knots inside her; sometimes she is on Alderaan, sometimes she is not, but always, always, Darth Vader’s hand is on her shoulder, his fingers searing through her dress and her skin to scar deep inside her, his twisted breathing in her ear, slow and mechanical through his mask.

Darth Vader is always there, and so is _where is the base_. She wakes up biting her tongue – sometimes literally, sometimes until she bleeds – clenching her jaw so hard her teeth ache, spine coiled tight and hands balled into fists until her fingernails form little half-moons in her palms.

She wakes up all wild eyes and silent scream, and sometimes in the dark of her rooms she swears she sees the flicker of a black cloak, a metal hand, a terrible, terrible mask, and she is frozen in terror until the moment passes, and then she hates herself for it, hates herself for letting her torturer and gaoler continue to have such power over her.

Sometimes she is lucky, and the dreams come close to the morning, sometimes they don’t, but in either case Leia can rarely go back to sleep after.

Most mornings find Leia Organa the first to be in Command, already starting on the day’s work and deep in her thoughts of strategy and diplomacy and war. No one on the base is unkind – or stupid – enough to comment on the darkness under her eyes, or the way her hands shake just slightly when it’s not yet late enough in the day for her to forget.

Some mornings (but only sometimes, sometimes, when sitting alone in the yawning emptiness of Command gets to be too much for Leia) find Han Solo walking out of his quarters only to be confronted with the sight of an Alderaani rebellion general uneasily asleep on the couch in the main hold of the _Falcon_ , her datapad still in hand and flickering with new reports every now and then.

Some mornings (only the rarest ones, when Han Solo suddenly remembers how _tired_ Leia Organa must be, how young she is to have endured and suffered and lost so much) find Leia tucked into Han Solo’s bed, carried there carefully by a smuggler with a too-soft heart.

*

It hits Leia much, much later, in the mess hall two weeks after the destruction of the Death Star. She is seated beside Luke, his arm casually thrown around her shoulder, and Wedge, pilot that he is, says something truly _filthy_ in Corellian that has Han’s eyes almost bulging out of his sockets and his neck immediately flushing a colour that Leia didn’t even know was possible. He’s the only one (other than Chewie, probably) who understands what Wedge said but the table erupts into laughter at Han’s reaction all the same and Leia laughs along with them, raising her voice to join in the chorus of Chewie’s shouted rumbles and Luke’s breathless laughter and Wedge’s chortles as he slaps Han on the back. It is then, as she throws her head back and lets the mirth flow out of her that she realises – this feels _right_.

She watches her friends – and how wonderful, that she can call this ragtag band of Rebellion fighters in need of a shower her friends – as their amusement dies down to undignified snorts and giggles; Luke is shaking beside her, wiping tears from his eyes, Chewie is still roaring in garbled Shyriiwook to nobody in particular, and Wedge continues to make insinuations under his breath, his expression bordering on devious.

It fills Leia with something that she can’t really describe.

It feels like waves crashing on the beach at her family’s summer residence on Naboo; feels like sticky summer nights with her adoptive sisters; feels like curling up next to her mother and just closing her eyes to shut out everything but the soft fragrance of Breha’s perfume and the steady rhythm of her heart.

She doesn’t know what it is, but she just knows that it feels right.

(Perhaps it feels like family.)

*

Here is something that not a lot of people know:

Han Solo falls in love with Leia Organa within the first week of meeting her.

Realising that he is in love, however, is a different matter altogether, but here is something that Han Solo knows:

Han Solo realises that he is in love with Leia Organa before she does.

He meets her as Princess of Alderaan, Senator of the Republic, and he finds her proud, hot-tempered, and quick-witted. He is irked at first (who does she think she _is_ ) but the annoyance gives way to grudging respect to admiration to – maybe – love. Contrary to popular belief, Han Solo is not an oblivious pirate with as much emotional capacity as a particularly annoying brick wall – no. He has been around the galaxy, has seen too much to not realise the first stirrings inside him, and has known too much to not accept them for what they are.

Here is another thing that Han Solo knows:

He realises that Leia Organa is in love with him before she does herself.

It may be arrogant to say that, but it is true. He knows it, sees it in the way she smiles and her brown eyes brighten with the brilliance of a million suns when he walks in, sees it in the way her shoulders loosen and she breathes easier when she is around him, or tucked into his side on the _Falcon_. He recognises the signs, because he sees them every morning staring at his own reflection in the mirror.

So. He recognises it, but he does not act. Han Solo does not chase Leia Organa – sure, he flirts and asks to kiss her and makes innuendos that cause her to roll her eyes, but he does not fall at her feet and ask her to spend the rest of her life with him and marry him and raise a family with him – but _gods_ does he want to.

Han Solo does not chase Leia Organa because how could he? She is young, and beautiful, and effervescent. Her passion shines through when she leads, the ideal of a New Republic burning bright behind those firelight eyes, some part of her still untouched and standing strong in spite of torture and in spite of losing her home. He is an Outer Rim smuggler, a decade older than her and too much yet not enough at the same time.

He does not deserve her, so he does not try. Instead, he teases her and makes her cheeks flush with anger (Your Worship, Your High-and-Mightiness, Princess, Princess, Princess, because to him she is _royalty_ ) but he also makes her laugh, delights in the way her laughter can fill a room and turn heads.

Han Solo realises that Leia Organa is in love with him before she does so herself, so on Bespin, when he is lowered into carbonite and a Princess wrenches forward to say that she loves him, he knows only one answer.

(She does not see how he would give her the world if he could. She does not see how he wants nothing more than to hold her close and let her find a home with him, so he just gives her a sad smile, because he will never see her again, will not-live forever, frozen as a trophy on Jabba’s shelf.)

“I know.”

*

When Luke loses his hand, Leia feels his pain as acutely as if it were her own, and she gasps, left hand flying to an arm that is, impossibly, still intact. Her knees buckle from the pain, and they crash onto the cold metal flooring of the _Falcon_.

“What’s wrong?” Lando bursts in, eyes wild, that _stupid_ cloak billowing behind him.

She doesn’t trust this man, of course, would be happy to personally throw him in the airlock and let him be torn out into deep space, still feels something deep and feral and _angry_ trying to claw its way up and out of her every time she so much as looks at him and is reminded of what he’s done (Han, Han and red, dim lights and carbonite so freezing cold she could feel it ten meters away and too-mechanical wrong breathing behind a black mask) but he’s the only one left _to_ trust, besides Chewie, so she settles for looking at the wall behind him and lacing her tone with more venom than is strictly necessary.

“Luke’s in trouble,” the pain is gone as quickly as it came, and she struggles back to her feet. “We have to go get him.”

“How do you know?” Lando still stands in the doorway, less tense but still on edge, forehead creased in equal parts worry and skepticism.

Leia does not have an answer (it is the Force, but Leia does not know this) but her conviction is unswerving, and eventually Lando gives in.

Far away, Luke Skywalker clings desperately to a bridge, screaming in pain, turmoil bubbling through his veins as he watches a man claim to be his father.

(Even further away, a ghost is so angry she screams as well, without anyone to hear her. She knows the Force, but she is not strong in it, and so here she is, trapped in the space between living and leaving, watching the man she used to love tear apart everything she built. She screams herself hoarse at the father of her children, _stop, stop, Ani stop, this is not the way, this is not who you were meant to be_.)

(She knows the Force, but she is not strong in it, so the man she is shouting at does not hear her, and they watch their son lose his grip and fall.)

*

When she hears that there is intel on the smuggler Han Solo, Leia Organa – storm-and-twister Leia, all ferocious tenacity and relentless faith – bursts like a whirlwind into Command, her hair coming loose from its intricate braid, and her blood pumping a wild, unsteady rhythm through her veins.

“Is it true?” Leia’s gaze is searching, her voice as measured as she can make it, her whole body pulled taut like a thread about to snap as she seeks out Mon Mothma or Rieekan or _anyone_ who can tell her what she needs to know.

When Mon Mothma meets her eyes – returns her look with one of her own that is too understanding for Leia’s comfort – and nods, the first thing she feels is pure _relief_. The air rushes out of her in a noisy breath, and Leia Organa allows herself a real, small smile for the first time in a long time.

 (To be exact, eight months, one week, two days and five hours.)

“Go, General,” the older woman holds out a datapad that Leia doesn’t doubt holds all the information on Han Solo’s location, her spine tall and strong as ever, “bring him home.”

Leia takes the datapad, her fingers trembling just the slightest bit. She nods at Mon Mothma, her gaze all durasteel again, and walks out of the room to find a Wookie.

 _I will_.

*

It’s ridiculous, but Leia is cold.

Leia is cold, in this Tatooine sun-and-sand heat; the shade does little to keep away the waves of heat rising from the hard-packed ground and the twin suns scorch Leia’s skin, as it does everyone else’s, but she still feels cold.

Her hair stands on end and her skin crawls and she feels chilled by the continuous eyes of everyone on every part of her. The ridiculous contraption that Jabba has put her in bites into her skin, leaves everything but the most essential parts of her bare and she continuously has to suppress the urge to curl herself into a ball and hide away from everyone else.

(Some logical part of her acknowledges that this is partly because curling up is simply not practical in this – outfit, but mostly Leia Organa is too damned proud to leave her fear and shame as bare as the skin on her back.)

She hisses under her breath every time the Hutt yanks on the chain connected to the metal collar – what else can it be called? – around her neck and tries to ignore it. It should be the least of her worries now, with Luke and Han and Chewie and Threepio about to be thrown into the mouth of a sarlacc in front of her very eyes and _Force_ does she feel useless, tethered to Jabba the Hutt and unable to do much more than watch as the people she loves most are thrown to their deaths.

Han is still half-blind, his gaze on nothing in particular as he squints ever so slightly in a futile attempt to let his vision clear. She can still see him shaking from the effects of the carbonite, even from that distance away, and her heart aches to see him like this, vulnerable and lost to her.

Luke is calmer than she has ever seen him; he has changed, her best friend has, has become some more collected, less brash and impulsive version of himself ever since he came back from that trip to Dagobah. She can see it in the way he carries himself, and she is sure that if she asks him about it he would give some stupid mystical answer about the powers of the Force. He threatens Jabba with his hands bound and a crony inches away from kicking him over the edge, and Leia wants to break out into hysterical laughter. By all the stars, how does he still think he is in any position to make demands?

(Some small, buried part of her screams with the same surety that Luke is displaying, is calm and peaceful and confident in their victory, but Leia is a logical person, damn it, and the same instinct that she has placed her trust in for so long is also what has led her to be chained to a Hutt, primped and pretty, so _excuse her_ if she decides to err on the side of logic for once.)

The situation clearly seems as ridiculous to Jabba as it seems to Leia, because he laughs – that sickening, wet laugh that sounds nothing like everything she has come to associate with happiness, sounds nothing like Han’s baritone chuckles and Chewie’s rumbles and Luke’s undignified snorts – and gives the order.

Then Luke suddenly has his lightsaber in hand, and all hell breaks loose.

Jabba’s cronies are doing their best to contain the almost-Jedi cutting his way through the crowds, and the familiar purring of Luke’s saber is music to Leia’s ears. There are screams and crashes as Jabba’s faux court all trip over each other in their attempts to run. C3-P0’s fretting is just barely audible over the cacophony, as is Han’s confused shouting and Chewbacca’s distinctive roars.

It is all noise and confusion and chaos, and in the midst of it all Leia sees her chain out of Jabba’s hands and forgotten on the floor.

Her body is moving before her mind catches up, and she seizes her chance, lunging over to grab the end before the Hutt notices. He barely looks up, too busy shouting at his men.

Leia jumps around the disgusting slob, and she _pulls_.

The metal bites into her hands, but the bite is different from that of the scraps of cloth and metal Jabba has put her in. She relishes in the feeling of the cold steel digging into her palms, feels some grim satisfaction as the chain jerks and trembles and then finally goes still.

(Something in the room seems to coalesce, envelopes around the chain and her grip and her shoulders with warm, familiar fingers; imaginary whispers in her ear telling her to _do it_.)

She pulls and pulls and _pulls_ , doesn’t let her grip loosen or let the chain slip through her fingers, doesn’t take her eyes off her captor becoming her ex-captor.

Jabba the Hutt chokes, and Leia Organa drops the chain in her hands, hears the links clink to the floor, clear and loud and music-sweet over the sounds of the room.

Later, she will remember to be horrified, will remember to be uncomfortable and try to forget how kriffing _wonderful_ it felt to watch the life leave his rheumy eyes, but for now Leia’s gaze harden and her spine straightens.

She drops the chain, and weaves through the terrified crowd in search of her friends.

*

Leia cries for the first time in years when Luke tells her of their parentage on Endor. She is afraid, and angry, and confused.

Darth Vader is her father.

Luke tells her, all earnest not-yet-Jedi, that their father found redemption, that he made his way back to the Light in his last moments, but Leia cannot find it in herself to forgive him. With Luke, it is easy – he is bright Tatooine farm boy, he has never known a father, has been yearning for one his entire life, and it is a simple thing for him to forgive. With Leia, it is not – she is proud Alderaanian Princess, she _had_ a father, and a mother, and Bail and Breha Organa were the best parents she could have hoped to have. She is all hard edges and winter wind so cold it bites, and she cannot forget that she lost her home because Anakin Skywalker lost his way.

Anakin Skywalker lost his way, and now she is afraid that she will do the same. Her adoption was never a secret, but Leia was always secure in the knowledge that at her core, she is an Organa, and she is the oldest Princess of Alderaan, no matter who her biological parents were.

But now – now: she has the blood of Darth Vader running through her veins (and no matter what Luke says she cannot forgive him, cannot forget that he was evil and _cruel_ ) and when her twin tells her that she is also strong in the Force she cannot think of anything but of how Anakin Skywalker was also strong in the Force, and how that was his downfall.

She is the child of a traitor, of a Sith Lord, and Leia runs from Luke and she cries.

(She thinks back on all the times she almost let her fury overtake her and wonders how many times she has flirted close to the Dark Side.)

When Han finds her, she is vomiting into the bushes, her stomach empty and heaving, the bile burning its way up her throat and she remembers how Anakin Skywalker once burned, how he burned and burned and became Darth Vader and _oh gods_ –

“Leia?” Han’s voice is soft, as if trying not to startle a wounded animal (which, in some ways, Leia supposes she is) but the note of alarm in his tone is undeniable. Leia wipes her mouth and looks up at him, her eyes red and puffy, her throat sore. She leans against a rock and pulls her knees tight to herself and does not say a word.

“I – I saw you running off and I asked Luke what happened and he said that I should probably ask you personally.” And oh, in that moment Leia hates her twin, but she is so thankful for him at the same time, because she does not know if she has the strength to tell Han she is the daughter of Darth Vader, does not know if she wants to tell _anyone_ she is the daughter of Darth Vader, but she is so relieved that Han still does not know.

“Hey, hey,” Han crouches down beside her – with some difficulty, his lanky frame is so much larger than hers – and peers at her with concern. “It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but I’ll just sit here with you, alright?” Leia takes a deep breath, and nods, and Han sits on the moss and soil next to her, his arm draped around Leia and pulling her in tight to his side as his thumb rubs soothing circles on her shoulder.

He starts talking, his low voice almost lulling Leia to sleep (but that’s a lie, she’s too on edge to sleep, her nerves tattered and electricity-sparking). He tells her stories, tells her about his adventures with Chewie, about his time in the Academy, about the trees he climbed and the bones he broke as a boy, and when he runs out of stories to tell about himself, he moves on to the Corellian folk tales that he barely remembers, embellishes the bits he recalls with details that he made up himself. Leia listens in silence, leaning into him, and somewhere between the blaster bolt scars and the drinking contests and the princes who slew sarlaccs Leia tells him.

It comes out of her suddenly, the confession that Darth Vader is her father, and she is almost as surprised as Han when her silence cracks to make way for her voice, broken and hoarse, but she finds that once she has started she cannot stop. She rambles on, and on and on and on; she is so deathly afraid, afraid that she will turn to the Dark Side like Anakin Skywalker did, afraid that he is not truly dead, that he will come back to claim her, that Han will be disgusted, will leave her and never come back because how can she deserve to be loved, if she is _Darth Vader’s daughter_? She tells him all this and more, and by the time she is done she is crying again, and she tries to look at Han but the tears are blurring her vision, so in those few moments she does not realise that he continues to watch her not with hate or fear, but with love.

Han Solo is not disturbed by this revelation. In fact, to him, it explains a lot.

Leia Organa has Skywalker blood.

He is not disturbed. Leia is beautiful and unfailingly strong. She is hurricane-destructive to those who hurt her or those she loves. Leia, ice-fire woman that she is, is a study in contradictions; she is the steady, unchanging hardness of winter, made of permafrost and unmelting glaciers; she is heat and lightning, always ferocious and never understanding the meaning of backing down. She is brilliant as the light of all the suns and stars in the galaxy, burning white-hot and fierce and ready to burn up those who get too close, so of course she is a Skywalker.

Why else does she hold such fire within herself if not so she can be worthy of walking amidst the incandescence of the stars?

Han tells her all this and more, and he knows that it does not fix everything, (that would be naïve) but he sees the doubt in her eyes ebb away a little, and Han decides that, for now, it is enough.

He takes her hand, and vows to stay.


	2. but always keep them on a leash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i'm back thanks if you came back too

**CHAPTER II**

 

The blue holo-image of Han's face wavers for a second - the reception is patchier than usual, and Leia tsks in irritation.

Perhaps it's because this Outer Rim planet is much further from a main satellite than anyone would have anticipated.

_Or_ maybe it's because of interference from all the blasters that are going off within a ten-metre radius.

One of the aforementioned blasters zings past Leia as she crouches behind a rotting wooden crate, the heat fairly singeing before it strikes a smoking hole in the wall behind her.

"Dammit, Leia, I told you not to go on this suicide mission!"

"Ambassadorial Peace Mission," Leia corrects with a sniff, before taking a quick glance at the leader of her security detail. The woman jerks her head toward an alleyway behind her, and Leia nods in understanding. “The citizens of Gomera must recognise that the New Republic bears them no ill will, and seek their cooperation in the pursuit of a harmonious galaxy.

"Does _this_ look peaceful to you?" Han's hands are thrown in the air, blocking his face for a moment. His visage flickers even more wildly with a burst of radio chatter a little to Leia’s right – the team is getting ready to leave.

“Well, Captain Solo,” Leia shifts her weight onto the balls of her feet, watching the squadron leader carefully for the signal, “I apologise for any concern I may have caused you – clearly, this was a very bad time to make a call.” She spares a moment to take one last glance at the small image being beamed from a band on her wrist, one finger of the other hand already on the button. “I’m afraid it’s time for me to go, I’ll see you back home.”

“What – Leia!”

Han doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because in the next moment a sharp whistle tears through the din of blaster bolts and things going _boom_ , and Leia is on her feet.

She tears down corner after sharp corner, eyes ever fixed on the soldier in front of her and trusting in the commander’s ability to see them through the maze of sandy streets, lined with the suspicious litter that seems to be ubiquitous in all corners of the galaxy. She trips more than once and she’s pretty sure she will have to submit an official request for a new set of senatorial robes, but the next time Leia truly comes back to herself, she is on a New Republic shuttle pulling out of hyperspace.

The moment the blinding white streaks of hyperspace give way to the silent darkness of the Hosnian system’s outskirts, the proximity alarm starts beeping rapidly, and Leia glances over to the Captain’s chair. The crew immediately tenses up, and she sees more than one hand - or limb, in the case of the non-humanoid crew members - drift ever so slightly closer to some form of weapon.

But then the second officer announces, “It’s the Millenium Falcon, sir.”

There is an audible collective sigh, although in Leia’s case it might be more a sigh of exasperation than of relief. She, however, does not get much time to think on it, because at this moment the ship’s med-droid rumbles over.

“I’m fine, Tee-Five,” Leia says distractedly, waving away the droid. Then, in the direction of the cockpit, “Let Solo board the shuttle, Captain.”

“Apologies, Senator, but it is standard protocol to conduct a full bodily examination after a Code 174 situation.”

“ _Thank you_ , but I barely got a scratch, and there may be other crew members who’re worse off than me.”

A pause, then:

“Apologies, Senator, but it is standard protocol to conduct a full bodily examination after a Code 174 situation.”

“I know that, thank you Tee-Five, but my skin is really not the priority right now.”

“Apologies, Senator, but it is-”

“Yes, yes, standard protocol to conduct a full bodily examination after a Code 174 situation.” Han’s voice rings through the cabin, and Leia’s head whips up at the sound. “Stars, Leia, just let buckethead do their job, won’t you? Especially after that shitshow of a mission. Remind me again who thought it was a bad idea to send the New Republic’s most recognisable ex-war general to an old Imperial outpost?”

Leia glances at the other crew members, who are not really as surreptitious as they may try to be with the way they turn away to avoid looking at either of the couple. She narrows her eyes at Han as he draws closer and pulls her spine up straighter.

“We are _not_ having this conversation here,” she whispers in a tone that banks sharply into a hiss when the droid, still checking over Leia, prods at a particularly nasty scrape.

Han just looks pointedly at the injury as if it proves anything.

(It doesn’t.)

He opens his mouth, looking like he’s about to say something irritatingly smug, but is interrupted by the droid.

“Thank you for your cooperation. No further medical assistance is recommended. Please wait while a full report of the examination is produced.”

“Oh that’s really not necessary-”

The droid is already spitting out a strip of Republic-issue biodegradable paper, and Leia sighs, thinking about the administrative nightmare that is filing mundane, redundant medical reports.

That is, of course, until she catches sight of that one line, at which point any and all coherent thought flies out the window.

“Shit.”

Han snaps to attention, his brows instantly drawing together. He hurries around the retreating droid and his hands reach for the printout.

 

“What, is something wrong? What are - you’re _pregnant_?”

Han’s jaw looks locked into place, the paper crinkling in protest in his tightening grasp, but Leia barely notices because she’s counting back the weeks to –

_Oh_.

“Shit.” Leia doesn’t feel up to saying anything else at the moment.

“ _Shit_.”

*

Later, after a pre-emptive fifteen-minute lecture by Leia on the sin that is gossip followed by three straight hours of furtive looks from the crew, when the pair have settled in for bed in Leia’s quarters three streets away from Senate Headquarters:

“It’s not,” Han is being uncharacteristically fidgety, running his hands a couple of times through his hair while Leia tries her best to do some last-minute reading in bed, “It’s not _that_ bad, right?”

“What?” Her tone is distracted, and she doesn’t put the datapad down.

“The kid. Us. Having a kid.”

Leia stills.

She sighs, glances up for a moment and glances away just as quickly, turns to set her datapad on the bedside table.

“Han,” she sits up in bed to better look him in the eye, “we’re two people trying to help set up a brand-new government for an entire galaxy, and we get shot at on a twice-weekly basis.”

“Yeah, but, well,” Han trails off, frowning slightly. “Does that mean you don’t want to keep it?”

Leia’s brow immediately creases in a deep frown, and Han panics, backpedalling, “I mean – I don’t care either way! I mean – I do care, but, you know,” he shrugs slightly, “it’s your body, Leia, and whatever you choose, I’ll live with it.”

(Damn, but he wishes he could tuck her into his side, at least feel the warmth of her breath next to him and that comfortable discomfort of her mass of hair tickling his jaw, but Leia is Leia, and he knows from years of experience – some good, some…not that good – that she is a firm believer in eye contact in Serious Conversations.)

“I don’t know, Han.” Her fingers twist together, her shoulders slump ever so slightly. “This was so unexpected, and I really haven’t thought about children at all – at least not over the past few years, what with the war and the rebellion and everything – I mean, have _you_?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but something must show on Han’s face because Leia’s hand flies to her mouth.

“You have?”

(Shit.)

Han shrugs again, trying his best to sound nonchalant.

“I mean, yeah, when we started getting serious I…considered that it might be a…distant possibility,” he hedges.

“Oh, Han.” Leia’s mouth tilts, and she moves to lie down, resting her head in the crook of his shoulder.

(Huh.)

“I don’t know,” Leia says again, the words muffled by Han’s own pyjamas. He feels the sigh that follows next, the heave of her chest as she thinks. “But we can talk about it.”

Han stays silent and waits for her to pick up on that.

“But not tonight.” Leia wriggles into a more comfortable position. “I’m exhausted, and besides – I think we have some time.”

That’s fine, Han thinks, and he says so. “Anytime you’re ready, Leia.”

He stretches over Leia’s head to switch off the lamp, and contents himself with the rise of fall of her chest as her breathing slows, with the smell of her shampoo, plain, clean soap with a hint of jasmine and lavender, familiar as any scent.

He closes his eyes, and is just about drifting off to sleep when:

“You thought about kids?” Leia mumbles into his chest.

Han stiffens, feels the tips of his ears warm slightly.

“Well,” he replies, hesitant, slowly, “I kinda always wanted a little girl. And after Endor,” he doesn’t finish the sentence, just shrugs slightly.

Leia laughs, the sound soft and sleepy.

“Presumptuous of you, Captain Solo.”

“Always.”

And he stretches his neck a little, pressing his lips to the crown of her head.

*

They do eventually decide to keep the kid, and somewhere between all the visits to the doctor and arguments over whether _Millennium Falcon_ is an appropriate name for anything, let alone a child and Luke’s exuberant, over-the-top purchases of baby clothes, Leia gets plenty of opportunity to test out the idea of Han as a father.

She decides she rather likes it.

*

“We _need_ to send representatives to these Outer Rim planets. Slavery is still very much alive, and-”

“Senator Organa.”

Leia turns to the interrupting voice, and raises an eyebrow slightly as Senator Kol Gin rises from his seat.

“Could you please clarify what you are referring to by the use of the term ‘slavery’? The New Republic has outlawed slavery, as everyone here is aware, and as you yourself said just now these workers are being paid.”

Kol Gin is Coruscanti, born and bred, raised from young among the politicking and practised disdain of the Core’s upper echelons. His accent is all crisp consonants and sharp vowels, wealth and breeding evident in the way he shapes his words.

“They are paid, yes, but it is clear for anyone to see that this is no more than a formality. Senators, these workers are paid a _pittance_ ,” Leia turns her back on Kol Gin to address the room at large, hands clasped tightly together under her robes, “barely enough for them to feed and clothe themselves, less to say their families.”

“Senator Organa,” Kol Gin interrupts again, slower this time, his words carefully and overly enunciated.

“Surely you realise sending Senate representatives to these planets would be unwise? These workers are _being paid_ , and therefore under the laws of the New Republic their employers are doing no wrong.” He spreads his hands apart in a gesture of faux helplessness, “I understand your concern, _truly_ , I do, but I’m afraid there’s simply nothing to be done, and dispatching personnel to the Outer Rim on such a fool’s errand would be a waste of precious time and resources, not to mention we would run the risk of offending many major corporations.”

“Indeed, Senators,” Senator Heeran chimes in. The old togruta stands, and her expression is apologetic as she addresses Leia, “These corporations are, technically, well within their rights, and by law there is nothing we can do to stop them.”

“If there is nothing the law can do, then perhaps there is something the _lawmakers_ can do.”

Leia’s voice is defiant, her gaze cool as she watches the room erupt into whispers.

“Are you suggesting we amend the New Republic Constitution, Senator Organa?” Senator Heeran looks taken aback, her features faintly outraged.

“Indeed I am.”

At this, the whispers escalate into full-blown arguments. The Senate floor is suddenly filled with representatives talking heatedly over each other, and from where she sits in the place of the Chancellor, Mon Mothma shoots Leia a tired look.

“Enough.” Mon Mothma’s voice cuts into the din, and heads automatically turns to where she has risen from her seat, hands placed firmly on the rostrum in front of her.

“Senator Organa is right, we must find a way to stop the exploitation of these workers-” the Senate floor erupts into chaos once again.

Mon Mothma’s voice booms across the room, “ _However_ ,” she raises her hands, palms flat and facing down, “However, this is not an issue that can be solved with changes to the New Republic Constitution, at least not for now. The New Republic remains young, and, I’m afraid to say, fragile,” and at this her gaze turns to Leia, “and to amend laws that we have fought so long and so hard for will be a security threat we cannot afford to deal with at the moment.”

_Shit._

Leia bites her lip as the Senate erupts into approving murmurs, and she nods, once, sharply.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the blond head of Kol Gin turn to whisper in the ear of his neighbour.

Leia finds herself walking a few feet behind the Coruscanti later, when the day is over, and her blood boils to overhear him.

“…ridiculous, to suggest changing the laws,” he says to the Senator beside him, “Too young, and too much of her father in her; Organa always was stupid – noble, of course, but reckless with – I – what the-”

Leia sweeps past him, her nose turned into the air as her fellow Senator suddenly trips seemingly on thin air, stepping on the fabric of his robes and tearing it with a loud _rip_ that echoes through the room.

*

They’re sitting around the table – Leia, Han and Chewie – having their breakfast in the _Falcon_ , Han frowning moodily down at his toast for some reason or the other as Leia reads her reports and mostly ignores his sullen brooding.

(Gods only know why they spend so much time on this bucket of bolts; it’s not like they don’t all have their own quarters in the city.)

“Leia,” Han stops sulking at his toast to sulk up at her, “we _are_ getting married, right?”

She snorts into her caf.

Chewie looks up so fast from his holodrama that Leia is pretty sure he snaps something in his neck, gets up, and leaves the room without a word.

“Sure, Han,” she doesn’t even look up from her datapad.

“I’m serious.” She can feel his frown burning a hole in the side of her head, and she raises her head slowly, one eyebrow steadily climbing up.

“Married,” she says flatly, “You. And me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Her brow is furrowed, and Han can’t decide if she’s genuinely confused or just messing with him.

“Because – because of that!” He gestures wildly in the direction of Leia’s stomach, swelling slightly under the fabric of her robes.

If anything, she only looks even more bewildered. “Because I’m pregnant?” She – finally – puts her datapad down, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Because!” Han is starting to look near as confused, and the way he keeps swinging his hands around makes Leia think vaguely that he might be experiencing a human version of a circuit board malfunction. “You get married before you have kids! We’re already behind schedule!”

“Are you serious – Han Solo,” Her voice is climbing dangerously in volume, “That’s a load of Outer Rim hick bantha shit and you know it, you –”

“Don’t do that!” Han looks horrified.

Leia throws her hands up in exasperation and shouts back, “Do what?”

“Swear in front of the baby!”

“What the fuck?” Leia is standing now – she can’t remember standing up.

“ _Stop that._ ”

“I’m not swearing _in front_ of the baby! The baby doesn’t even occupy an actual space outside of another human body – which is, in case you didn’t notice, me!”

“That’s irrelevant!” Han stands up, and suddenly he’s towering over her.

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

(Leia thinks it grossly unfair that he constantly uses his unfair height advantage to loom over her.)

“Um.”

Han and Leia turn to see – glare at – Luke standing in the doorway.

“Should I go –”

“No!” They snap at him at the same time, and Luke visibly shrinks back from the weight of their collective anger.

“Han was just about to apologise,” Leia says, glaring up at the Corellian.

“I was _not_ ,” Han glares back, “Don’t you try to walk away from this, Princess –”

“I’m sorry,” Luke interjects timidly, his curiosity-slash-confusion apparently winning out over his sense of self-preservation, “what exactly is this about?”

“We’re getting married.”

“We are _not_! Luke doesn’t think we should get married!”

Funnily enough, Leia doesn’t even glance at Luke when she says this, and Luke doesn’t remember being consulted.

He decides to voice this concern, his sense of self-preservation once again nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t remember being asked –”

“The hell does Luke know about anything?” Han, like Leia, does not turn to look at the subject of discussion.

(Needless to say, Luke feels a little offended.)

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Luke says, at the same time that Leia shouts back, throwing her hands up, “We’re Force-sensitive twins! I know what he’s thinking!”

“That’s not how the Force _works_!”

“Oh, and you would know? Mister Space Mumbo Jumbo?”

(To be fair, Luke has to admit that he, indeed, knows nothing the hell about anything.)

“It just ain’t right, is what it is, raising this child without a proper family!”

“In case you didn’t realise, Han Solo, we’ve been muddling along as a family for quite a while without getting _married_!” The last word comes out as an honest-to-gods screech, and Luke winces.

It is at this moment that Chewbacca strolls back into the kitchen and washes his breakfast dishes with the couple’s screaming in the background. He walks across the room to stand beside Luke.

(He can’t be sure, what with all the, well, _fur_ , but Luke is about 70% sure that Chewie raises an eyebrow. Or, at least, what passes as eyebrows for Wookies.)

Chewbacca rumbles a greeting at Luke, who waves absentmindedly back, still slightly cross about essentially being ignored.

The greeting is followed up with a suggestion, and _that_ catches Luke’s attention.

“It’s ten in the morning.” Luke turns to look up at Chewie, his tone dry.

The Wookie shrugs and vaguely gestures towards the quarreling pair in a way that seems to say _didn’t stop them, why should it stop us?_

Luke turns back to the couple – still screaming – and bites his lip in contemplation before turning to look at Chewie again.

“Just _two_ drinks.”

Chewie shrugs.

*

Ben’s birth takes an entire day.

It’s not common, but certainly not _uncommon_ either, and the doctors assure her at first that there is nothing to worry about. Besides, she spends the earlier part of the morning in nothing more than some mild discomfort anyway, and it’s not until later in the day that she starts to curse herself, this child, and Han.

(But mostly Han.)

It starts out well enough, of course; when the doctors finally deem her having gone into _actual_ labour, she has started to feel the contractions, but they are still relatively far between, and she breathes like she’s told to, and she pushes like she’s told to, and she occasionally squeezes Han’s hand a little too tight.

It starts out well enough, but it gets worse.

The doctors progressively sound less and less sure as the labour drags on, and the pain becomes worse and worse, and Leia starts to scream herself hoarse, but something or the other is stuck, and they don’t seem to make much progress for what feels like weeks but is probably actually just the better part of the day.

At some point, Leia starts to actually become terrified. When she screams and screams for what seems like hours, but the pain just doesn’t stop, she suddenly remembers another woman, who lay in the birthing bed and screamed in the birthing bed and died in the birthing bed. She sees the doctors, muttering to the side and she knows that there is something wrong, that this isn’t normal. She sees Han, through the haze of her pain, his brows knitted together tightly in worry and _gods_ , but she barely has to strength to really focus her gaze on him before another wave of pain rips through her and she screams with all of herself again.

Her throat is hoarse, her voice barely there anymore by the time the sun sets. She is so, so tired, her eyelids are heavy and falling and every bone and muscle and tendon is screaming. She pushes her face into the hand that Han has placed on her cheek and she wants nothing more than to just give up and go to sleep, but every now and then Han whispers more encouragement into her ear, or the doctors tell her to push harder, or _another_ wave of pain rips through her, and she remembers that this is her _baby_ , so she grits her teeth and forces her tired eyes as far open as they will go and bears down.

He is eventually born, though, their child – their son – and there must be something in Leia’s face still, despite her utter exhaustion, so Han relents and doesn’t name their son Falcon, or worse, _Millenium_. He is so impossibly small, and Leia’s arms are so weak she can barely hold his slippery body when the medidroid passes him to her, but Han sits down next to her and lends his arms. His face is scrunched up tight, his hands balled into fists and waving slightly, and the patch of jet-black hair is matted and curling.

“He has your temper, this one.” Han smiles down at her as he says this, and there is a special type of love and reverence in the way he looks at Leia in this moment, and she’s too tired to smack him – or do anything, really – so she doesn’t give him any scathing retorts, doesn’t even roll her eyes. Han must see this, because his smuggler’s (father’s) smile just quirks up further, and he leans down to press a kiss to her forehead, uncaring of her bangs curling wildly over her face and her skin soaked with sweat, and whispers, “Rest now, Princess.”

Leia barely hears him finish his sentence before she closes her eyes and lets sleep take her.

(In that moment she thinks she sees a woman standing by her bed, big brown eyes and a sad, sad smile. She thinks she sees a hint of pride, thinks she feels a cool, barely-there hand on hers, thinks she hears a whispered endearment, but she falls asleep before she can be sure, and then when she wakes the woman is forgotten.)

*

“Hey, baby sister,” Luke greets cheerily the day he saunters in through the door of Leia’s office, all blonde hair and blue-eyed sunshine, just like every other time he swings by.

(Well, he calls it “swinging by”. Leia, on the other hand, calls it “paying a visit” or “wasting my precious time with your bullshit, Luke, get out” depending on the mood she’s in.)

“First off, I’m not your baby sister,” Leia spares the time to glare irritatedly up at Luke before she looks back down at the paperwork in front of her, “Don’t you have better things to do?”

“Nope.” He pops the p as he plants his behind firmly on her desk, knocking some of her documents askew in the process, and Leia throws her hands up in annoyance, not-so-accidentally jabbing Luke in the face in the process. “Also, you don’t even know what I’m here for yet.”

Leia gives up on trying to tug that one report out from under Luke’s – undoubtedly sweaty – behind, and leans back in her chair, crossing her arms and doing her best to look at her brother like she just found some particularly nasty Dagobah swamp muck stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

Luke barely reacts – he’s used to getting that look from people.

“Doesn’t matter – I’m busy, and you’re trespassing.”

Leia is calmly ignored.

“You look like a rancor chewed you up and spat you out, baby sister.” Luke’s face never loses any of its cheerfulness, and Leia raises an eyebrow. It’s true, she knows; there are insane bags under her eyes and her skin is dull and possibly breaking out, but there is a newborn infant to coddle at night and a Senate to appease in the daytime so _pardon her_ if she looks a little less than her best at the moment.

“Thank you, baby brother,” her voice is as flat as she can make it.

“Maybe the happy glow of marriage will sort you out.”

Leia screams internally.

(Maybe a little bit externally too, if the slightly shocked look on Luke’s face is anything to go by.)

“Not you too, for the love of the Force.” She semi-slams her forehead into her desk and doesn’t look back up.

“I’m just saying, as your brother I have the right to know why you don’t want to get married.”

“Don’t do that.” Leia’s voice is muffled, because she hasn’t yet found the willpower to lift her head up from the desk.

“Do what?”

“The innocent, dewy, _look at me, I’m just a simple boy who spent my whole life on a Tatooine moisture farm_ look.”

“You can’t even see my face!”

Leia doesn’t raise her head so much as tilt it to one side and narrows her eyes – or rather, eye – at Luke, before turning back to plant her face fully in the desk again.

“You’re doing it.” Leia’s tone brooks no nonsense and is one that Luke knows well enough, so he carefully sidesteps the issue.

(Much like a small animal – a rabbit, maybe? – might sidestep a sarlacc that just so happens to surrounded by eggshells – very noisy eggshells.)

(Luke takes a little while longer to ponder the metaphor, though, because he’s not sure yet if he appreciates the comparison of himself to a rabbit.)

“I just,” Leia pipes up in the time that Luke takes to consider if he would like being a rabbit, “I don’t know if I can trust him?” Leia finally sits up again only to flop – or what passes for flopping for Leia, who _never_ does something as undignified as flop – against the back of her chair, her expression bordering on miserable. “We all know that he has a tendency for getting himself into ridiculous, unlawful, _dangerous_ situations, which involve blasters and blood and near-death scares and I just really don’t need that –”

“Leia,” he interrupts, and when she snaps her mouth shut and looks up at him with a petulant scowl he continues, “I honestly have no clue what you’re talking about. Look at how great he is with Ben!”

The sunny Tatooine farmboy smile is back, and Leia is immeasurably irked when she realises that he’s right. ( _Fuck_.) Han is nothing but gentle with Ben, and much more patient than she is, and less prone to tears and frustration when he won’t stop crying, and definitely way more knowledgeable about what to do with screaming newborns in general. If nothing else, she hasn’t heard a peep out of him about running off on a ridiculous caper through the galaxy in _at least_ three months, which is quite a feat for Han Solo.

Clearly, Luke realises that he’s somewhat gotten through to her, because his smile widens into a full-blown grin that stretches his entire face in delight (and no small amount of smugness).

“Think about it, sis.” Luke winks and quickly darts off the table and out the office door, and Leia grits her teeth, looks back down at her datapad.

And then she remembers that Luke leaves for Yavin in an hour, doing, as he called it, “Jedi stuff”, and wonders if it would be immature to try to get in the last word over holocall.

( _Fuck_.)

*

(Han was always better with Ben, of course, but something happened in between what is and what should have been, and Leia isn’t ever going to know whether they would have done right by him, but what she will know for a fact is that trial-and-error parenting or no, _any_ parenting would have been better than what Ben got.)

*

Leia wakes up, gasping, her skin crawling as she scrambles up and holds the sheets tight to herself.

“Leia?” Han is immediately awake as well, his hazel eyes wide in the first dawn light. “What’s wrong, Leia?” His gaze darts around the room, resting for a moment longer on the chair across the room where Leia knows that his belt is slung, blaster firmly in the holster. He takes her hands, and it’s only then that Leia realises her hands are trembling.

“It’s –” The word comes out hoarse, broken, barely a whisper, and Leia clears her throat, “It’s the Force – I don’t know, I don’t know, something’s going on –”

(That’s an understatement. Something is _wrong_ ; Leia feels it, in the very marrow of her bones, something twisted is settling, making itself known in the Force and Leia can _feel_ it, and stars if it doesn’t fill her with terror.)

“I – I need to call Luke.” She runs a shaking hand through her hair, and barely realises that her forehead is soaked with sweat, getting up and pulling on her robe almost unseeingly.

“Leia,” Han reaches a hand out, still seated on the bed as she curses while trying to tie the robe with unsteady fingers, “It’s the middle of the night on Yavin; Luke’ll be asleep.”

“No, he won’t.” She turns to Han, “He’s felt it too.”

Her brown eyes are wide, pupils dilated and when Han sees the bone-deep fear in them – Han is no Force-sensitive, but dread forms, solid and heavy, in the pit of his stomach.

“Well, shit.” He rubs a hand over his face and stands up as well, pulling on a shirt. “I’ll –”

The sound of a baby crying rips through the tense silence of the apartment, and the both of them start.

“ _Ben_.” If anything, the look in Leia’s eyes becomes even hollower, and Han squeezes his eyelids tight for a moment.

(Gods, if whatever this is is affecting Leia this much, Han hates to think how scared and their infant son must be right now.)

“I’ll get him.”

Leia nods and hurries out of the room, presumably to holocall Luke, and Han slips into Ben’s room, where he finds a screaming six-month-old, his face red and screwed up tight and his hands balled into fists.

“Hey, little man.” Han tries to make his voice as soothing as possible as he picks his son up and holds him close. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, shh.” He tamps down his fear and runs a hand over the wispy black curls on Ben’s head instead, rocking him gently, “It’s alright, Mama’s taking care of it, Mama and your Uncle Luke. They’re taking care of it and everything’s going to be okay.”

Ben doesn’t stop crying, and so Han keeps babbling nonsense, keeps shushing the boy and pressing kisses to his sweat-soaked forehead.

_I don’t want it,_ Leia had screamed, when Luke had tried to persuade her to train as a Jedi, had called their Force-sensitivity a gift. _I don’t want it,_ she had screamed and raged and Han had been there for that fight, one of the worst that the twins had ever had, and afterwards as he had held her while she cried Han’s heart had broken a little, and now he feels it break again at the tears that don’t stop running down his son’s face.

_Oh, my boy. Oh, I’m so sorry._

He starts singing lullabies at some time, Corellian lullabies from his childhood and Alderaani lullabies he learnt from Leia and the scraps of other tunes he learnt here and there in his years of smuggling. This seems to calm Ben down somewhat, and while he doesn’t quite go back to sleep his screams soften to the odd sniffle, and he stops shaking hard enough for Han to feel it in his ribs.

When he decides to go out into the living room to check on Leia it is a full thirty minutes later, and his arms are aching with the weight of the baby but he doesn’t dare put Ben down.

“– but what _is_ it?” He hears Leia asking, her voice soft but urgent as she leans forward, almost as if to travel through the screen of the datapad and talk to Luke in person.

“I don’t know,” Luke looks older, wearier, the blue light of the holocall washing him out as he runs a hand through his hair, “I’m getting on the next flight out to Hosnian Prime. We need to discuss this with the rest of the Senate; I should be there by midday.” Han drifts in behind Leia, bouncing Ben slightly, and Luke nods at him, “Hey, Han.”

“So, no ideas on what this thing is?” Leia looks unbelievably tired, and Han shifts Ben’s weight to slide an arm over her shoulders.

“Lots of ideas,” Luke runs a hand through his brown curls again, sighing, “but no conclusions. All we know that this is Dark side stuff, but we definitely still need more information.”

Han sighs as well, and nods at Luke, “Then there’s nothing we can do now. Try to get some sleep, kid.”

The corner of Luke’s mouth quirks up slightly at being called “kid”, but he doesn’t pass any comment, just nods back and signs off with a greeting. Even after the datapad screen goes dark, Leia keeps sitting on the couch, her eyes seemingly staring at nothing, gaze darting around randomly.

“Leia?”

No response.

“Princess?” He squeezes her shoulder gently, and that seems to somewhat break her out of her reveries as she turns to look at him, her gaze still a million parsecs away.

“I wasn’t just talking about Luke when I said to try to get some sleep.”

“I can’t – Han, I can’t –”

“I know, Princess, I know,” He tugs gently at her, and she barely even seems to notice as she follows him to her feet, “Just try, yeah?”

“I – oh, I – okay.”

Han hums in approval and leans down to press his lips into her temple, gentling chivvying her to the door of their room before he continues down the corridor to place a now-sleeping Ben back in his cot, but then –

“Han?”

“Yeah?” He turns to see Leia still standing on the threshold of the room with a white-knuckled grip on the doorframe.

“Ben should sleep with us.”

Han hesitates, looks between Ben and Leia for a few moments, before something in the set of his shoulders loosens.

“Yeah, alright.”

He shuffles back to the room, and the three of them settle back into the now-cooled sheets.

Leia immediately presses her body as close to him as she can, with their son in the middle, and Han can’t help but press another kiss to the side of her head.

“Everything will turn out fine, Princess. You’ll see.”

*

“There was an attack, last night, and I suspect that was what you felt.” Mon Mothma is tense in a way that Leia hasn’t seen since the war, the corners of her eyes strained tight.

They are sitting in her office, the very upper echelons of the Senate trusted with the galaxy’s most important secrets with the addition of, of course, Luke.

Leia looks around the Chancellor’s office and is struck, again, with a sick sense of déjà vu. Too many of these people are the same who fought and strategised and argued by her side during the Rebellion, and the tension in the room, sharp and heavy, is one that Leia knows all too well.

It has not escaped Leia’s notice how much this feels all too much like a war council meeting, and she suspects that the same can be said for most of the rest in the room.

“It was minor, thankfully.” Mon Mothma carries on, her spine stretched tight as she paces across the carpet, “No severe casualties, just,” she pauses and sighs, and if anything her shoulders pull themselves even tighter, “based on eyewitness accounts, this attacker left behind a lot of –”

“Fear,” Luke interjects, and Leia glances at him sharply, but Mothma doesn’t seem offended at the interruption.

“Exactly. Basically, going off everything we have now, this attacker – Snoke, apparently – fancies himself the next Sith lord; or close enough for it to not make a difference.”

“What do we do now?” The Shilian Senator asks.

“We wait, and we investigate further.” Mon Mothma sighs again, “We’ll be sending out a team to Lothal to check out the site of the attack. Master Skywalker, if you would be so kind as to follow the team and see what you can find out. We’ll need to step up our investigation – while this is not the first of Snoke’s attacks, it _is_ the largest one by far –”

“Wait, what do you mean this isn’t the first?” It is Luke’s turn to shoot Leia a look as she nearly snaps at the Chancellor, but she ignores him, “If this – Snoke is going around playing at being a Sith lord why were we not informed beforehand?”

“I thought we had it under control,” Mon Mothma turns to look Leia in the eye, her tone biting before it softens suddenly, “that was my mistake, Senator Organa, and I promise it will not be happening again.” They hold each other’s gaze for a moment longer, before Leia nods, and settles back into her chair.

“I trust every one of us here understands what is at stake here,” Mon Mothma turns, now, to address the room at large, her presence commanding again as her voice fills every corner of the office, “this Snoke character is not to be taken lightly; as I’m sure you all know, we cannot afford to let him get what he wants.”

She does not say, _The New Republic is too young._

She does not say, _The New Republic is fragile._

She does not say either of these things, but the rest of the room hears it anyway.

*

“I can’t believe you’re _eloping_ ,” Luke hisses, his voice low and anxious as the three of them pick their way through the darkened streets of the city.

“We’re not eloping,” Leia can almost feel Han’s raised eyebrow, the tilt of his head evident even in the shadows cast by the looming buildings.

“Elopement suggests we’re running,” Leia says primly, “Han and I aren’t running anywhere. We’re just choosing to have our wedding at a slightly unconventional time and place.”

Han snorts, the sound loud and startling in the middle-of-the-night stillness, and Leia laughs, a wind chime sound that she hasn’t made in a long time.

_“Marry me.”_

_It is the middle of the night, in the height of summer on New Alderaan. Their son sleeps one bedroom away, and the threat of new, dark forces still looms over them, and Leia is sure that there will be hell to pay come morning, but she is also sure that she has never wanted anything more in her life._

_And Han – Han, short, brown curls tousled from sleep and eyes impossibly alert despite having been woken up suddenly at stupid o’clock in the night – Han says,_

_“Yes.”_

Leia’s blood sings through her veins, and her body feels impossibly light, almost effervescent, as if she might float up and up into deep space if she is not careful. It brings her back to a simpler time, reminds Leia of the days just after the Rebellion, when the Empire had fallen and, it had seemed, fear along with it. It reminds her of hot, sticky nights out with only Han and Luke, the three of them stumbling, drunk and laughing, through the streets of Corellia or Bakura or whatever planet they had been posted to.

Her heart thrums in her chest, and Leia feels carefree in a way that she realises she has sorely missed, and she doesn’t even need to squint through the darkness to see that Han and Luke feel the same.

Her hand finds its way to Han’s, his palm calloused and warm and wrapped tight in hers, and when she squeezes his hand, he squeezes back.

When they finally stumble onto the Falcon, after weaving through New Alderaan’s empty streets, Han presses his lips to her forehead quickly, fiercely, before loping through the main hold and going into the captain’s quarters.

He emerges with a simple box, small and dark and Leia’s breath catches in her throat.

“Princess.” His voice is uncharacteristically soft as he opens the box.

There, nestled in the velvet and ever-so-slightly reflecting the artificial light of the Falcon, are twin bands of metal, Alderaani silver and Corellian steel.

“Oh, Han,” her voice cracks on the words, and Leia clears her throat before she tries again, her eyes shining as she stares up at him, “they’re beautiful.”

Han picks up the one made of Corellian steel and slips it gently onto her finger, and the feeling of the cool metal sliding into place sends a jolt down Leia’s spine. He holds the box out towards her, a wordless request, and she returns the favour by placing the silver band onto the ring finger of his left hand.

“A part of me for you, and a part of you for me,” Han whispers, his hand still held tight in Leia’s, and she feels her throat seize up suspiciously.

Even now, his cheeks are pink, his gaze unsteady in something like embarrassment – the great Han Solo, still clinging to the last dregs of his pretend nonchalance – but in that moment, Leia’s world narrows to Han (Han, her _husband_ , Han); narrows to the way some of his brown hair sticks to his forehead, sweaty from the walk from their quarters to the Falcon, narrows to the way his hazel eyes are shining in earnest, the set of his jaw and the broken curve of his nose as near and dear to her as can be.

(That is, of course, until Luke shatters the moment.)

He whistles, leaning over their entwined hands to poke at the rings, “How long have you been holding on to these, Han?”

Han rolls his eyes, and Leia has to stifle a giggle at the truly impressive stink-eye that he gives Luke when he says, “Long enough.”

Luke whistles in appreciation once more, and it is Leia’s turn to roll her eyes now.

“Do you want to get on with the ceremony now, _Jedi Knight_?”

Luke sighs and rubs a hand over his face.

“We are gathered here today, et cetera et cetera, Han Solo and Leia Organa, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

“Luke!” Leia’s voice is scolding as she reaches out for a smack that he neatly dodges.

“What?” He sounds slightly peeved, “I learnt how to levitate rocks, not how to marry people.”

Han shrugs.

“Good enough for me, Princess.”

When he leans in and presses his lips to hers, Leia thinks, _finally_.

(Later, there will still be work. There will still be never-ending papers and nosy bureaucrats and the threat of the Dark, but amidst all the fear and frustration –

Perhaps later they will invite some of their friends to drop by, and they will all laugh and eat and drink in the pink-gold light of the setting sun, here in their little home. Han will inevitably make some irredeemably lame joke that the entire family will be in stitches over anyway, and Luke will share some of his new exploits trying to bring life back into the Jedi Order and Ben will watch his uncle, wide-eyed and adoring, and Han and Leia will roll their eyes and share secret looks over glasses of wine, and Leia –

Leia will be utterly, utterly content.)

*

“Mama?”

The voice is tiny, afraid, and Leia sits up in bed to see the face of her son hovering at the door, his pale skin almost luminescent in the darkness of the room. Han wakes up as well, rubbing his eyes, his voice thick with sleep.

“Ben?” he squints at the chrono beside the bed, “What time is it?”

“I had a bad dream again.”

And – oh, but Leia can feel it now, the sickly, cloying feeling of the Dark Side, clinging to the air around her son – _her son_ – like an old lover. It is not a feeling Leia is unfamiliar with, reminds her of a tyrant calling himself an Emperor and presiding over a mock-Senate, reminds her of labored breathing behind a faceless mask, hard, gloved hands resting on her shoulder and –

“Leia.” Han squeezes her hand, and she looks to her side to see her husband watching her, his gaze both concerned and questioning. She takes a deep breath and nods.

_It’s happening again._

In the dark, Leia can just barely make out the lines of her husband’s face, but the worry rolling off him in wave is clear enough and with another squeeze of the hand for good luck, she gets out of bed and goes to Ben. He had started insisting, a while ago, that at ten, he was far too to continue calling her Mama, had started calling her Mother instead, but now, his hand trembling as she intertwines her fingers with his, he seems to have forgotten all that.

She leads him back to his room and tucks him in, and her son tells her of the man in his dreams, the same man who keeps appearing, who tells him terrible, terrible things, and whispers in Ben’s ear to join him, and Leia is _terrified_.

She wants to scream and cry, wants to comb through the entire galaxy until she finds this Sith lord – because make no mistake, this is a man looking to restore the Sith, or at least some new version of them – and kill him with her bare hands for frightening her precious boy this way, for tainting his childhood with such darkness and sickening, sickening evil.

_Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering._

Leia is no Jedi, but, but.

Ben – her son, her flesh and blood, her only child – is looking up at her, his breathing shallow and uneven, tired eyes forced open for fear of falling asleep and seeing that man – Snoke, he told her his name was – again.

Leia is no Jedi. Her father was, before he turned, and so is her brother. She is not; she walked away from that path a long time ago because she saw power of the Force and wanted nothing to do with it.

Still –

“Don’t be afraid, Ben,” she reaches a hand out and smooths back her son’s dark curls, his thick and unruly hair so like her own when she was a child, and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Fear is the path to darkness,” she whispers, like _this is a secret, just between you and me, baby_.

(Ben leans forward eagerly, whether he knows it or not, into the hand that she has rested on his cheek, and it completely and utterly breaks Leia’s heart to see her child so afraid, so tired.)

“Now then, I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep, okay?” Ben nods, and Leia shifts to tuck them both more comfortably into bed, to wrap herself over the trembling curve of her son’s spine, and smiles as encouragingly as she can, “Do you still remember the meditation techniques I taught you?”

For now, this works – waking up to soothe her son back to sleep and helping him sort through the tangle of his thoughts and dreams. Later, though; later, he will grow to resent her, will grow to despise his father, will turn to the embrace of the man he once feared so.

Later, her son will become someone she doesn’t recognise any longer, and Leia will always carry around a hole in her heart, shaped like a little ten-year-old boy who loved to climb trees but was afraid of the dark, will always carry a weight that feels like regret but for now, for now all she has to carry is that sharp warning that the Force always brings, the one that she has learned not to ignore, and she will do her best.

(It isn’t enough.)

*

Leia wakes up one night sweating, gasping for breath, and Han shoots up beside her almost immediately, smuggler instincts honed sharp.

_Screams, screams, thunderclaps rock the earth and lightning cuts a too-white gash in the sky, rain is pouring down, Leia’s feet slip in the mud as she runs and runs and runs –_

“Leia?” Han’s voice is still a little hoarse from sleep, but his eyes are alert, darting around the darkened room.

_She is tripping, the ground is wet from the rain and gods there’s blood_ everywhere _, black and undistinguishable from the rain until the lightning flashes again and the scarlet screams up at her from the ground –_

“Leia?” Han’s brows are knitted tightly together, his hands firmly on her shoulders as she stares, wide-eyed, hand clasped tightly over her own mouth in horror. “Leia, talk to me.”

_The flash of a lightsaber; the flash of a dozen lightsabers, cutting through the air, through – oh Force no, those are only_ children _. Red, red and unstable and sparking and a too-familiar silhouette in black robes, a too-familiar Force signature flaring as the younglings scream and scream and scream –_

_I’m sorry, Mother._

“Ben.”

The name comes out of her in a whisper, in a gasp, in a prayer, even as she feels her son slip further and further away.

“What?” Han’s voice is starting to take on a note of panic, “What’s wrong? Is he hurt?”

“No, he –” the words lodge themselves in her throat, refuse to come out, “he’s done something terrible.”

The dream – the vision – comes out of her in stops and starts (and _oh stars_ but the screams, too thin and too high and too _young_ still echo in her ears), her voice trembling and broken as she watches her own horror slowly become reflected back to her in Han’s eyes. She spends the rest of the night in Command with Han, hair unkempt, both of them shivering and dressed in barely more than their nightclothes, too high on adrenaline and fear to go back to sleep.

The news comes, finally, at daybreak, a hurried transmission from a small squadron expecting to drop off some supplies but finding, instead, a temple burnt to nothing more than ash and a few pillars, lightsaber marks still scorching on the walls and the forest nearby. Worst of all, children’s bodies litter the ground, from younglings no more than five years old to padawans on the cusp of adulthood, tiny bodies as well as gangly, too-long frames, none of them left breathing.

Luke Skywalker and ten of his oldest pupils are missing.

Ben Organa-Solo is one of those ten, but this Leia already knows.

Two hours later, amidst the panic and chaos of figuring out _what do we do now_ , a communications officer turns to Leia and says, face ashen, “Incoming transmission from Master Skywalker, Ma’am.”

(Leia is at once relieved and afraid, because when she reaches out she can no longer reach her twin, can only feel his Force signature burning behind a wall that she cannot break down; Leia doesn’t know what that means, and she finds that she is not sure if she wants to find out.)

The transmission does not bring Luke himself, standing safe and whole in a holo; no, all it brings is a message, and even that message is short and simple – just two words.

_I’m sorry._

And oh, but Leia feels that this must be the universe playing some cruel joke, but –

But Leia is a leader, so she pushes it aside, grips Han’s hand a little tighter for the rest of the day, and focuses on the work that needs to be done.

(She works as she always has, but she is also so, so _tired_ , just wants to be _Leia_ instead of General Organa for a day and hold on tight to what she has left and shut out the rest of the world but she is a soldier, first and foremost, and so she soldiers on.)

*

Han storms into the room, cheeks flushed, hair a mess. His footsteps echo through the corridor, and the door shivers with the force of him opening it.

“Oh,” C3-P0 looks up, “I must say, Captain Solo, this is most-”

“Out, Goldie,” Han spares the droid a brief glare, before returning his ire to his wife, his voice a low growl.

“Well I never – Princess-” Threepio looks to Leia for help, but the crown of tight braids remains firmly unmoving, her eyes locked onto the desk in front of her.

“Well,” the droid equivalent of a huff, “I’ll be on my way then.” He leaves, but not without a slight bow to Leia and another – slightly stiffer – one to Han.

“Where have you been?”

Leia looks up, raises an eyebrow, and goes back to her files.

(If her grip tightens enough for the folder in her hand to crinkle, Han doesn’t notice.)

“I could ask you the same,” is the non-answer, her tone dry.

“You wouldn’t return any of my holocalls,” Han fumes, and slams a hand onto the file, forcing Leia to finally look up, “I was going out of my mind, I thought-” Han pauses, and he looms into her personal space, his hands braced on her desk. Leia watches as his throat works, “I thought something might have happened to you.”

“Well,” Leia picks up a datapad in lieu of the file her husband has taken, “as you can see, I’m unhurt.”

“Dammit, Leia!” His voice, already loud before, rises to a shout, “I was worried, okay?”

At this, Leia looks up, and slams her datapad onto the table with a crack that she will remember to wince about later.

“Well then, Han Solo,” her eyes are blazing as she stands up, her chair giving an audible screech, “Maybe you should have thought about that before you went gallivanting through the galaxy for _months_!”

“What?” Han’s brow furrows, and the anger on his face clears for a moment, giving way to confusion.

“Yes, it doesn’t feel good, does it?” Leia barrels on, “Having someone off _gods know where_ doing gods know what, without so much as a by your leave!”

“Stars, Leia,” Han runs a hand through his hair, his jaw tightening, “Is that what this was? Some sort of kriffing _revenge_?”

Someone stops in their tracks outside the room as Han’s voice rises again to echo through the corridor, but Leia just grits her teeth and glowers at him as the togruta outside immediately ducks their head and scurries away.

Let the door be open for the whole base to hear them if he wants, what does she care?

“I had a job, Leia, I told you when I left!”

“A job!” She fires back, coming around the table to jab a finger into his chest, “A job that turned into two, then three, then twenty!”

“You were off playing the rakish smuggler, while I’m _here_ , dealing with this so-called Snoke, and trying to _find Ben_.”

Han’s shoulders tense at the name, and Leia knows the feeling well, recognises how it rips a brand new tear in her heart like it always does, lets herself breathe for a moment as she watches her husband stand in front of her. She reaches a hand out to grab his wrist, thin fingers barely wrapping around the calloused skin and unyielding bone, suddenly-soft eyes searching his face.

“Our _son_ is missing, Han.”

“I know.”

He lifts his free hand to grasp hers back.

“I know, I-” The breath rasps out his throat in a frustrated near-growl, “You think the past few months have been all fun and games? I’ve seen what he’s done. He’s gone, Leia – he’s gone, and we need to move on.”

The words seem to echo in the room like a death knell, two pleading syllables wrapped up in fear and exhaustion, leaping into the space between the pair of them. He finally returns her gaze, and so he watches as her eyes, those warm brown eyes that he so loves and that so often burn, burn so fiercely, shutter closed. Her eyelids tremble for a moment, and when next she speaks her gaze is cold to the core.

“How dare you – how _dare_ you – to just give up on your son like that, when you barely ever even gave him a chance-”

“You think I don’t know that?” Han snaps, and it is his turn to turn on her, even as he watches her eyes widen in horror at her own words, even as he watches a hand flutter briefly over her mouth. He turns away and wrenches his hand out of Leia’s grasp, “You think I don’t regret not spending more time with him, not trying harder to understand him, not _seeing_ what he was going to do before it happened?”

He sighs, as his shoulders turn in on themselves, the combined effect of the two suddenly making him look smaller. He takes the few steps to the door, and Leia watches as he stands on the threshold, the shadows conspiring to make him look even older, more hunched, than he already was.

“I regret it all, Leia, but it’s time to move on. And I can’t keep watching you lose sleep over this.”

He looks back over his shoulder once more, but Leia turns her head, and fixes her gaze on the desk instead, fingernails scratching over each grain of wood.

He leaves, and Leia stands in silence, listening to his footsteps echo down the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i tried my best to explore what leia was up to between what we know from the original trilogy and the new movies and i still feel like there's way too much domestic han/ben stuff which if that's your thing is great!!! but i really wanted to write about her as a senator and a Working Woman but i realised that would set me down a ten-thousand word path with a full subplot about politics and here in my land we tend to follow a ratio of 9:1 character:plot so oops?
> 
> tl:dr - im sorry


	3. all you have is your fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rian johnson can suck my dick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright i was really unsatisfied with this chapter and i kept holding on to it bUT i just watched the last jedi and i am full of rage so here you go i'm posting this specifically because crylo ben gets fucking obliterated and i need that right now thank you very much
> 
> i'll probably come back and edit this into a more coherent shape at some point but right now i really need the catharsis this brings

**CHAPTER III**

 

When Leia finally leaves the Senate, the media works itself into a frenzy almost immediately. _Leia Organa: Radical Princess?_ _Leading Senator Turns Back on Democracy. Rebel Leader Returns to Her Roots._ The headlines write themselves, the newscasters spend whole segments dissecting her every move, the readers’ letters section is ablaze with angry letters, hopeful letters, congratulatory letters.

(Not that Leia sees any of it. She is in a bunker on Takodana, writing letters to old contacts and rubbing shoulders with new ones.)

When Leia finally leaves the Senate, it is amidst a cacophony of outrage, her aides scrambling in her wake, her datapad and senatorial outer robes left at her seat, the other senators clucking behind her like so many disapproving chickens –

(But no – that is unfair, Leia realises. Not that many have as intimate a knowledge of the Dark side as she does; not that many see the danger hurtling towards them at a frightening pace; not that many _want to_ , and how can she blame them for it?)

When Leia finally leaves the Senate, she tenders her resignation like how she has done everything else in her life – boldly.

(“In that case, I would like to formally withdraw from my position as a representative of the Senate,” she says, voice echoing, clear, across the marble and concrete of the Senate floor, gaze firm as the room falls pin-drop silent for a few seconds before erupting into chaos.)

When Leia finally leaves the Senate, it is because she finds herself reminded of her mother, reminded of her father, reminded of all they tried to do and failed when they were in her place. _This is how the Old Republic fell, is this how the New Republic will fall as well?_

(“There is nothing we can do,” Chancellor Villecham says, his expression truly apologetic, his hands spread out, “I understand your concerns, Senator, I am sure that many among us have also had our suspicions, but until such a time as we have concrete evidence that the First Order is carrying out illegal activities, we simply _cannot_ take any action.”)

When Leia finally leaves the Senate, she receives a message within the hour that is addressed to “General Organa”.

(Leia thinks, _not again_.)

(Leia thinks, _finally_.)

*

She feels him before she sees him, a barely-there ripple in the Force before a wash of blue light encroaches on her desk. Leia is in her office, nursing a drink and a two-hour old migraine as she stares unseeingly at some new reports, and she looks up sharply at him.

“Leave.”

“Leia-”

“I told you this the last time; I have nothing to say to you.”

“Leia, please, it’s Ben, you have to help him, he _needs_ you-”

“What do you _think_ I’ve been trying to do?” she hisses, the edges of her vision suddenly tinged with red, her heart jumping double-time as she waves a sweeping hand towards the various documents and datapads strewn about her office. “What do you think all this is? I’ve been doing nothing but try to help him!”

“He still feels the call of the Light, but he’s – he’s – He’s strong in the Force, stronger than anything I’ve seen, and too young to handle it, and now this Snoke is pulling his strings – please, you have to help him, have to give him some real guidance-”

“So what you’re saying is he takes after you? After his-” Leia spits out the word like acid, “ _grandfather_?” Her tone is cutting, her cheeks flushed with anger as she glares at the figure in front of her.

The ghost of Anakin Skywalker stares back mournfully, and says nothing until Leia sighs, rubs a hand over her face.

“I told you to leave.” She hears her own voice – she sounds so old, Leia realises, she _feels_ old, each drop of blood in her veins war-weary. She watches her fa–Anakin Skywalker’s ghost and realises that she’s older now than he ever became.

“He has a choice to make, Leia-” He continues as if she hadn’t spoken, and Leia cuts him off, voice raised.

“And I’m supposed to make that choice for him?” She laughs, a bitter, hollow sound that cracks off the room’s walls. “Nice of you to come in here and tell me how to raise my son, especially when this entire mess is your fault in the first place. Why don’t _you_ tell him how to choose? He _worships_ you, worships _Darth Vader_ and all he stands for, so it can’t be that hard for you to return to your roots, can it? He’d listen to _you_ , not me!”

The silence is deafening in the aftermath of her outburst, the quiet echoing queerly in Leia’s ears as she stands, winded, chest heaving great gulps of air, her gaze accusing.

(A voice needles at the back of her consciousness, a quiet _Leia_ that reminds her of the way her parents would shake their heads in exasperation sometimes, a voice solid with understanding and grief, a note of reproach, a voice that brings to mind warm brown eyes and a regal silhouette cast in iron.)

The vision of Anakin Skywalker watches her back, his expression nothing if not more sorrowful than before.

“He has a choice,” he repeats softly, words a whisper-thin thread stretching between the two, “So did I, and I chose wrong.” His expression crumples suddenly, like the collapse of any empire, swift and great and terrible, but the moment is gone before Leia decides if it really happens, his features back in their previous baleful mask.

“I chose wrong.”

He doesn’t even give Leia the courtesy of getting in the last word. Those three words echo in his wake as the wavering blue vision disappears as quickly as it came, and leaves Leia alone, once more, with nothing but her work and the ghosts to keep her company.

*

Smoke curls, thick and dense, away from the blazing fire in front of her. It fades into the cool night air, indistinguishable from the blue-black patchwork of the sky within moments.

This is a tradition Leia has carried with her from childhood, from nights just like these spent in the private courtyards of her family’s palace. Flimsy paper imitations of food, clothing, transport are consumed by the red-orange-yellow flames – they burn bright for a moment, flare into hands of heat that push insistently at her cheeks before curling at the edges and disappearing into offerings carried away on the wind.

Offerings for the spirits of those who have left, those who visit their loved ones left alive and well and perhaps not-so-well. She does what she must, on this seventh month of the Alderaanian year, when the lines between this world and the next blur and shades walk amongst the living. Leia isn’t really sure, anymore, if she’s doing the correct rites, if she’s whispering the right things into the breeze, but –

But someone has to do it, someone has to remember the dead of Alderaan and who better to do that than the one who let the whole planet fall from her grasp, and who lost so much more besides?

Smoke curls, thick and dense, and Leia knows it will settle in her hair, that at least some of the bits of ash that spiral away from the flames will come to rest, as well, in the grey strands so different now from those of the wide-eyed princess clutching at her mother’s sleeve.

(She thinks she sees her mother – both mothers – settled, gentle Breha with the soft set of her jaw that could turn strict and unyielding in an instant; fiery, half-legend Padmé whom she only knows from holodocumentaries and smuggled documents, both queens in their own right, both with the same readiness for war in the slope of their necks but with less years of war in their blood than Leia does.)

(She thinks she sees Ben, an eight-year-old with curls that would not be tamed with any amount of brushing and a grin that would not be tamed with any amount of rebuke – but that’s ridiculous. Kylo Ren is alive, and well, and nothing Leia does is like to bring things back to the way they were.)

(She sees _him_ , as he was in his youth, not yet scarred and terrible, his image fading at the edges like the flames he stands behind, but Leia turns away.)

*

There is a special kind of fear that comes with leading a group like the Resistance. It is the knowledge, equal parts common sense and visceral, acidic intuition, that of the twenty-three thousand, nine hundred and fifty-six people under her command, some of them will die.

Most of them will die.

Before the fighting is done – if the fighting is done – Leia will have mourned countless pilots, said a few words for too many fallen comrades, have led infinite moments of silence. She knows this; more importantly, she accepts this, because it is not in her nature to prolong the inevitable, and even though the Resistance is in its early days yet, it takes a special kind of foolishness to blind herself to this fact, especially when she remembers losing six thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight.

(Not forgetting another nine hundred and seventy-nine million, one thousand and forty-two.)

It pains her, sometimes, that she cannot remember the funeral of every lost Rebellion fighter she attended. It pains her that the names and the faces blur together into a shapeless mass, it pains her that she cannot personally honour their memory.

It feels like a particularly vicious selfishness, on her part, to have forgotten those who believed in the Rebellion with every iota of their being, faith burning hotter than twenty of Tatooine’s twin suns. The cuts smart even more when she knows, she _knows_ , that she will not be able to remember most of the names that the Resistance will lose in the years to come.

(She is becoming weighed down with age and grief, and her memory is not what it once was.)

It feels like a betrayal to the pilots and technicians and medics and administrative officers and daily operational staff that she may not remember them if they go.

 _I’m sorry_ , she feels like saying when a young Ithorian passes her in the hallway with a nod of the head and a respectful, murmured acknowledgement.

 _Do you know that you may have had a relative in the rebellion, and I may not remember their name?_ She thinks when she shakes hands with a newly-minted pilot from Chandrilla with an excruciatingly familiar family name.

 _Are you ready to be consigned to nothing more than stardust and a whisper?_ She frets as an orphaned Bezim struggles into the main Resistance base after making it through layer upon layer of decoys and misinformation.

Some of those she speaks with, eats with, works with may be dead and gone within a decade, lives snuffed short by a blaster bolt with no mercy behind it, and Leia may not remember the sounds of their voices, their favourite foods, the curls of their handwriting.

But then again, Leia herself may die tomorrow, so perhaps her worries are moot.

*

Leia stands in the cockpit, hovering behind the pilots as the green of Takodana, marred by smoking gashes in the forest, stretches out before them. Her palms are sweating slightly, and it takes every ounce of her willpower to keep her face impassive and stern when the pilot reports, “We have a confirmed sighting of Captain Solo and Captain Chewbacca, Ma’am.”

She knows, of course, can feel his presence in that deep, warm part of her where the Force resides, can feel the light that he represents growing ever stronger as the transport pulls in closer and closer to the ruins of Maz’s watering hole. She feels it like a pull, feels it whisper to her as if Han himself was whispering to her, calling to her _Leia, Leia, Leia._

She steels herself and clears her throat when the transport bumps gently onto the ground, and if anyone sees her wipe her palms surreptitiously on her clothes, they have the discretion not to say a single word.

She pulls her shoulders back and walks forward and – he’s _there_.

Nothing can prepare Leia for the wave that threatens to knock her off her feet when she sees him, so different and so similar to when she last saw him, eight years ago. His hair is greyer now, the white strands having spread their way out from his temples, and his face is more lined, impossibly even more world-weary, and he stands with a stiffness that Leia can feel herself, with a certain bone-deep ache that seems to come with age.

And yet, and yet.

He is still _her_ Han Solo. His smile lights up his features in exactly the same way when he sees her, that flyboy smile that is gone as quickly as it came, as if he is afraid of someone seeing past his careless veneer. His fingers still tap restlessly against his blaster, still slung across his hip, and he still rests all his weight on one leg, still stands in that leaning, devil-may-care way that Leia used to think was awful and sloppy until she started missing it.

They stand there untouched by the bustle around them, a man and a woman both too old and tired for war, but still fighters and rebels at heart, neither knowing quite how to break the silence.

“You changed your hair.” The moment cracks with the low tones of Han’s voice, which, like the rest of him, is so familiar that Leia wants to cry. Force save her, but she never realised how much she _missed_ her husband, never let herself miss him until now.

Leia manages a small smile, “Same jacket.”

Han looks down, brushes a hand self-consciously over his front and shrugs, “Nah, new jacket.”

 _How have you been? Do you know where our son is, what he’s doing? Are you coming back for good this time? Gods, I’ve missed you. Every night I wish I could tell you about my day but you’re not there, but now you’re_ here _. I’m so sorry for everything I said, I take it back – I take it all back._

_Please stay._

Leia opens her mouth, ready to apologise, curse, laugh, but then Threepio steps between the two of them and the moment is lost. General Organa is back, and she directs the rescue effort and ushers her husband onto the transport with a herd of other patrons of Maz’s.

Later, though – later, on the way back to D'Qar, Captain Han Solo moves across the transport to stand beside General Leia Organa for the first time in eight years, and takes her hand, and nobody says a thing.

*

Leia is mid-sentence when it happens and – _oh_.

The feeling is at once monumental and yet not.

Why it is not monumental: with the Force, it is no more than the winking out of a light, just one in billions, but one that Leia knows all too well.

Why it is: The way that Leia’s heart responds is wildly disproportionate to the way the Force informs her. It screams, it tears itself in half and _Han_ , oh Han, her smuggler husband and her best-worst friend and it is at this moment that she realises that she has forgotten to be afraid that he will leave her, has forgotten that all her relationships end in loss, that her life _started_ with loss (the memories come to the forefront now, with a vengeance, her planet first then her son then her brother and now her husband).

For just one moment, she forgets to be a General. She suddenly feels all of her fifty-three years, feels the weight of all the people she has loved fiercely (because fiercely is how Leia does things – she has known no other way) and then lost. She is aching to her bones and _tired_. She wants to scream and cry but then she realises that the officers on deck are staring at her, leaning against the console, breaths shallow, and she remembers again.

She is a General.

She pulls her shoulders back and her chin up and she does not let herself mourn. There is no time for grief, especially not for her, daughter of Darth Vader and mother to Kylo Ren and leader of the Resistance, so she grips her datapad tighter, puts aside her grief for Han Solo, ( _Han, Han, please come back, Han._ ) and waves her troops on.

Later, later, she will find the time to grieve her husband ( _Han, you were prickly and reckless and sometimes-brave-sometimes-afraid but I would not have you any other way_ ) but for now, she pulls off the ring on her finger, the one crafted of Corellian steel, and places it in her pocket.

She does not let herself think of the one made of Alderaani silver that would have been on the same finger, on a different hand belonging to a man on a distant planet who fell and fell and fell.

*

Pounding music and laughter leak out whenever the doors to the mess hall open, the energy in the air nearly a tangible thing, a queer mix of relief and joy and anxiety for what is still yet to come. It is a night of celebration; after all, what’s not to celebrate? Starkiller Base is gone, that looming shadow that was only a few timeparts ago cast over the entire Resistance, over the entire galaxy, but the celebration is tempered, curling at the edges and tinged with a somber awareness of the millions of lives lost before the First Order’s weapon could be destroyed. Families and friends who were in the Hosnian system, lost to nothing more than a soundless scream into the void of deep space in the blink of an eye; comrades and brothers in arms who went down fighting, pilots who will now leave behind a painful space on the bunk that they slept in not two days ago.

Leia knows better than anyone that the people in the mess hall are mourning as much as they are celebrating.

(She is no stranger to loss, Leia Organa, no stranger to the gaping hole left behind by an entire planet’s destruction, no stranger to the death of a loved one in battle.)

She has been on the other side before, in her younger days, and some of the personnel who walk past her offer a smile, a salute, an invitation to join them inside (their condolences, a warm squeeze of a hand, a sad smile that tells the story of someone who has loved and lost), but Leia just shakes her head and grips her glass a little tighter.

The stars are bright and brilliant as ever, this far out into deep space on D'Qar, away from the pollution of the Core planets, burning on like they always have, and Leia wonders if they know, somehow, of the events of the past few days, and whether they would care if they did. She remembers a folk legend her mother told her – and gods, if this doesn’t sting, doesn’t feel like she has stepped backward, standing on a military base after days of death and destruction, after a victory against seemingly insurmountable odds, thinking of Breha Organa – about how every person takes up a spot in the infinite space that is the universe. How each planet was formed from the first explosion of gas and light and how every person eventually returns to that, how they become a new nebula somewhere in one of the countless galaxies; ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust.

Leia watches the stars, and sometime into the night, when it is too late for her to keep track of how long she has been sitting, cross-legged, on the cold, damp ground of the base, and when her glass has long been emptied, Poe Dameron jogs up to her, smelling of sweat and alcohol, and sits on the ground beside her.

“Ma’am.”

“Commander Dameron.”

“I’m sorry, General,” he pauses, flushes a deep red that is visible even in the late-night darkness, “About Captain Solo, I mean.” Leia turns to watch him, and when next he speaks the words come out in a near-whisper, “He was a good man.”

_You like me because I’m a scoundrel._

Leia watches the stars and the stars watch her back, and she wonders if Han is one of them, if the new, young star formed after his death is too far into uncharted territory for her to find it.

“Mm,” she gives the pilot a small smile, “he was. A great pilot, too – he never let me forget it,” and when Leia chuckles, Poe laughs with her.

They sit in silence for a while more, and when Leia asks if he wouldn’t rather be joining the party again Poe just shrugs, so she lets it drop.

“How is the Stormtrooper you brought back – Finn, was it?”

“Oh, yeah, Finn.” He smiles down at the ground, his fingers plucking at the grass, “He’s doing well! I just went to see him today. He hasn’t woken up yet, but Doctor Kalonia said that’s nothing to worry about, and he’s apparently healing quite nicely.”

“That’s good,” Leia bites her lip and watches as Dameron plucks at the grass some more, before continuing, “You like him, don’t you?”

She sees Poe actually jump, a full-bodied twitch as he turns to face her properly, his eyes comically wide.

“I – Ma’am, I don’t know what you –”

Leia rolls her eyes and waves his protests away

“I hear things, Commander Dameron; if there’s one thing I know it’s that fighters love to gossip,” her voice softens, “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing; it gives you an anchor, something to fight for and hold on to and come back for when all the fighting’s done.”

Leia tilts her head and raises her eyebrows slightly at him, a small smile forming on her lips when she sees that the raging blush from before is back.

“What do you like about him?”

Perhaps it’s instinctive – Leia doubts that Poe even realises he’s doing it – but the moment she asks, a grin spreads across his face, dazzling and soft around the edges. His eyes absolutely light up, shining in a way that resembles a sunset on Alderaan, the sun’s rays all pink and gold, caressing and warm.

(It is a look that is all too familiar, and Leia’s hand tightens around her empty glass. Poe Dameron’s expression reminds her of a million and one things at once, moments of love and laughter that have passed and can never be recreated again.)

“Finn is…he’s wonderful,” Poe hasn’t noticed the way that Leia’s jaw tightens, eagerly gesticulating as he speaks, and Leia forces herself to relax, “He was so afraid when he broke me out, I could see it, but he never looked back. He’s brave, even if he thinks he was just running away, and the amount of strength he has to have to break his conditioning – I just – I‘ve never seen anything like it.”

“He’s a good man.” Poe’s voice is immeasurably warm when he says that, an almost dopey smile on his lips, and Leia reaches out to take his hand in hers.

“Well, Poe Dameron,” Leia smiles at this man, still so much a boy to her in so many ways, and remembers days spent watching him grow up, remembers Kes Dameron and Shara Bey and the light and love they always had in their house, “so are you.”

He grins back at her, and he says,

“And a great pilot, too.”

Leia laughs, and he laughs with her, this reckless, too-brave fighter who is all wild wind and best intentions.

They sit out in the open for a little longer, under the watchful eye of the galaxy’s infinite stars, fingers numb and lips dry in the cold night air.

*          

When he steps off the _Millennium Falcon_ and drops the hood of his brown cloak, Leia is certain the entire base goes silent. Luke Skywalker is, after all, a living legend – or, well, the living part at least was up for debate until very recently – and Leia must admit that to those who don’t know him personally, he looks rather impressive, Jedi robes fluttering ever so slightly in the wind, and she notices that his lifelong attempts at growing a beard have paid off. She supposes it is no surprise that literally the entire field stops to stare as the last Jedi Knight descends the ramp of the _Falcon_.

It is for this precise reason that she strides across the tarmac to stand in front of him, and slaps him audibly across the face.

(Several pilots – the entirety of Black Squadron included – will later swear on their X-wings that everyone present visibly cringed at the _crack_ that echoed into the air.)

“Ow,” Luke looks shocked, and wounded, and he rubs his cheek in bewilderment as he stares at his twin.

“You absolute piece of bantha shit!” Leia Organa was royalty, is currently a General; her voice is made for command, and now it rings out over the D’Qar as she yells at her twice-long-lost brother.

“Leia,” Luke’s face is suddenly Tatooine farm boy all over again, and he sounds suspiciously like he is about to _whine_ , but before he can say another word he has the wind knocked out of him as Leia barrels into him and holds him tight.

(Luke almost gets whiplash, but he’s not sure if it’s from the figurative or literal force of this reunion with his sister.)

“Don’t you _dare_ leave like that again.” Luke is, still, taller than Leia by almost a full head, something that she has forgotten after ten years of his absence. Her voice is muffled by his robes and barely audible as she presses her face into his shoulder, but they aren’t Force-sensitive twins for nothing, so to Luke her message is loud and clear.

“Don’t worry, baby sister, I’m here to stay.” He reaches one arm up to pat her head awkwardly.

Leia Organa, younger than Luke Skywalker by all of two minutes, pulls back to give her twin brother an ice-cold glare that has sent many a commander running (and continues to intimidate Luke a fair bit, if the last Jedi Knight is in the mood to be honest) and looks at his hand like she might bite it off.

The hand that Luke had raised was his non-metal one, and he is a man who has learnt, over the past years, the value of self-preservation, so he decides to make the right choice and lowers it immediately.

*

The wind blows, ever so slightly, teasing through her hair and her clothes and Leia doesn’t see so much as _feel_ everything around her; the way the golden-red leaves of autumn break away a little more with every _shh-shh_ rustle, the way the air swirls and sways with every breath that dances through it, the way the ground hums with every step that has been and will be taken.

It has been so long – too long – since Leia has let the Force flow through herself like this, so long since she has let herself still, mind and body, and given herself over to the universe, but Luke walked into her office two hours ago and offered and –

How could she say no? How could she say no to Luke – her brother, her idiot, beloved brother? He sits across the clearing from her, and even now his Force signature is as familiar to her as her own; even after a decade of absence reaching out to him still feels like the caress of an old friend, perhaps even more so – when she finally felt his Force signature for the first time again a week ago it was like that time she first saw his face on the Death Star, like something missing in her life had finally clicked into place.

(They are sun and starlight, these twins; not meant to be kept apart.)

It is one of the last warm days on D’Qar and so Leia sits, in the sunlight, and lets herself feel. She is rusty, has pushed away her abilities for so long but here, in this clearing, she has more than enough help. Luke is there, of course, lending her his strength, her sense of him a solid anchor when she threatens to slip out of herself. Rey’s Force is strong as well, but scavenger-sharp and desert-fierce where Luke’s is gentle; if Luke reminds Leia of the lakes on Naboo, reflective and ever-so-constant, Rey is whitewater and breaking waves. Finn is there too, sat leaning against a tree, and sometimes the pain of his newly-healing back leaks into the flow of the Force between them. He is like Leia, strong in the Force, but never formally trained in it, and not as strong as the last Jedi and his padawan.

It is the closest Leia has come to peace in a long time, feeling the Force ebb and flow between them, reaching out with her senses beyond war and strategy and rebellion.

But it doesn’t last long, of course – with Leia, it rarely ever does. She feels her concentration break when she senses something – someone, hovering on the edge of her awareness, tinging it with what feels too much like fear.

She opens her eyes to see a disheveled uniform, standing at the edge of the clearing, back ramrod straight but face pale as a sheet. She looks oddly out of place in the vibrant reds and greens and yellows of the meadow, and Leia automatically feels a sense of dread when the officer opens her mouth.

(And oh, but that’s a feeling that Leia knows all too well – the Force is warning her; it is sick déjà vu and debilitating fear all at once because that feeling is Alderaan and a red lightning-split night ten years ago and her son and her husband.)

“There’s something you need to see, Ma’am.”

The rest break out of their meditation as well, and when she turns to Luke she _knows_. His face is tight, his jaw set in a way that she barely recognises (the Jedi are hope and compassion, the Jedi do not let their fear and anger rule them but in that moment Luke looks like he has aged a hundred years). Rey and Finn must feel some of their alarm because they exchange anxious looks and get to their feet without a word.

It is her son.

Of course it is. Leia knew it, from the moment she looked into her brother’s eyes, and saw her own conclusions reflected back at her. He has been spotted, on a system not too far away, seemingly alone and unguarded.

“It’s a trap,” is the first thing that Rey almost-shouts when they are given the news, but this Leia already knows too. The planet is uninhabited, the terrain unforgiving, and the sudden appearance almost too convenient, his apparent carelessness in letting himself be tracked even more so; why else would Kylo Ren be there, if not to provoke an attack?

When Leia looks up, her twin’s eyes are sad, but he knows.

“Don’t go.” His tone is pleading, and in between those words Leia hears all the things he hasn’t said – the guilt at what his former apprentice has become, the fear that he will lose his only sister, the desperate hope that maybe, maybe there might be another way.

They are joined by more than blood, she and her twin, she and her Skywalker twin, and so of course she hears all the things he hasn’t said, but still Leia pulls her shoulders back and looks him steadily in the eye (Alderaani Princess and Resistance General and Skywalker and Organa).

She doesn’t say anything – she doesn’t need to.

For a moment the room balances on a knife’s edge as they stare at each other, the daughter and son of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala; two children of two forces of nature, and forces of nature in their own right, so different and yet so alike. Leia watches Luke, and Luke watches Leia, for a long, unfathomable moment, until one of them caves.

She sees it, sees the way his shoulders hunch in ever so slightly and his face crumples for the slightest, most imperceptible second. He reaches forward, almost resigned, and takes his twin’s hand.

“There is still good in him.” His eyes search her face and Leia smiles gently, reaches a hand up to place it on her brother’s cheek.

(She suddenly thinks of a thousand moments, thinks of a beautiful woman with sad, sad, eyes, weakened and dying; she thinks of Luke on the _Falcon_ , she thinks of _herself_ , speaking to her husband for the last time.)

Leia doesn’t say anything out loud, but she reaches out with the Force, and she feels her brother reach back, feels him cling onto their connection like how he clings to her hand now.

_Not enough._

*

Leia Organa-Solo must kill her son.

No, that is not exactly true. The boy-man standing in front of her is no longer her son, even though he wears the same face (or almost the same, the boy-man is ten years older than they last time she saw him, but there are some things that a mother never forgets). He is a stranger, a monster that is all sharp teeth and black blood.

Luke had said to her, before she left, _there is still good in him_ and Leia had agreed. She is not trained in the Force, but she can feel it, the last shreds of the five-year-old boy who called her Mama and loved Uncle Chewie and tinkered on the _Falcon_ with his father. Luke had said to her, _there is still good in him_ and Leia had agreed, because she had felt the Light in him too.

But then she had said to him, _not enough_.

Luke may be right, but so is Leia.

Leia is as much unforgiving winter as Luke is gentle spring, and she is a General. Leia the General knows some things Luke the Jedi does not: sometimes there is no correct path to take, and just because there is still good in someone does not mean there is hope for redemption. There is no bringing back her son from the murderer he has become, someone who burns children and rakes his hungry fingers through the minds of good men and puts a lightsaber through an old, tired, fighter-smuggler who just wanted his family together again.

Leia Organa is still a mother, but she no longer has a son.

Lightsaber in hand, (her own, crafted from a kyber crystal gifted to her by Luke – she will not touch Anakin Skywalker’s saber, will never be comfortable with using the weapon of someone who once destroyed everything she had ever known as a living man and then again as a ghost) she blinks away the too-hot tears gathering in her eyes, and she lunges.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bear in mind that i wrote this like last year???? i called leia giving up on crylo ben he's a whiny genocidal punk bitch thank you for coming to my ted talk

**Author's Note:**

> if we've made it to the end congrats to you and congrats to me!! hope you've enjoyed yourself on this wild rollercoaster through leia's life and thanks so much for reading through it!! if you liked it/disliked it leave some words i'd love to hear feedback and, as always, i'm available on tumblr and heyspoiler to yell and cry with :)


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